Obama’s Twitter Account is Soon to be in the Hands of @realDonaldTrump
Local Editor
When the first ‘social media president' leaves office, Trump will take over his Snapchat, Tumblr and Twitter - but you'll still be able to find the past presidential tweets.
In 2007, Barack Obama's presidential campaign had to apply to MySpace's owners to wrangle back control of his profile page from a supporter, Joe Anthony, who had amassed 160,000 friends by running it as a fan page.
In hindsight, it was a defining moment in social media history - this digital real estate now had obvious value, and the professional classes were moving in to secure that.
It is a sign of how far we have come that, in 2016, all Obama's MySpace content has long since been junked into the social media trash-compactor created when the company wiped the slates and relaunched its offering in 2013.
Now, with the value of all things social incontestable, the White House press team is grappling with the question of who gets control of what, as the first "social media president" gets ready for the first social media handover. Which is why Obama's digital team recently published a comprehensive transfer plan.
The key date is 20 January 2017. As the inauguration ceremony is proceeding, accounts will be wiped of the previous occupant's content on every one of the president's social platforms - which now extend to Snapchat, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest and even Google Plus.
The 44th president of the USA will have his tweets moved over to a newly created @POTUS44. The @POTUS account itself has only been active for two years, replacing the more broad-brush @whitehouse.
It will remain with the new president, Donald Trump, as will its companion accounts: @VP for Vice-President Mike Pence etc, while Joe Biden's White House tweets will be archived under @VP44, and so on.
Had Hillary Clinton put her back into it a bit more in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, then the handle @FirstMOTUS would have been on-hand to replace @FLOTUS. What a touching world that would have been.
For each separate social media channel, the same basic procedure as Twitter will take place: Obama's archives being shipped out to new accounts suffixed with either "44", or prefixed with "Obama" - as in the Obama years' forthcoming Instagram handle [instagram.com/ObamaWhiteHouse] and Facebook [facebook.com/obamawhitehouse].
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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